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Growing up, I didn't always understand
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why my parents made me
follow the rules that they did.
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Like, why did I really
have to mow the lawn?
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Why was homework really that important?
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Why couldn't I put jelly beans
in my oatmeal?
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My childhood was abound
with questions like this.
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Normal things about being a kid
and realizing that sometimes,
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it was best to listen to my parents
even when I didn't exactly understand why.
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And it's not that they didn't want
me to think critically.
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Their parenting always sought
to reconcile the tension
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between having my siblings and I
understand the realities of the world,
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while ensuring that we never accepted
the status quo as inevitable.
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I came to realize that this,
in and of itself,
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was a very purposeful form of education.
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One of my favorite educators,
Brazilian author and scholar Paulo Freire,
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speaks quite explicitly
about the need for education
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to be used as a tool for critical
awakening and shared humanity.
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In his most famous book,
"Pedagogy of the Oppressed,"
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he states, "No one can be
authentically human
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while he prevents others from being so."
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I've been thinking a lot about this
lately, this idea of humanity,
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and specifically, who in this world
is afforded the privilege
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of being perceived as fully human.
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Over the course of
the past several months,
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the world has watched
as unarmed black men, and women,
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have had their lives taken
at the hands of police and vigilante.
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These events and all that
has transpired after them
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have brought me back to my own childhood
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and the decisions that my parents made
about raising a black boy in America
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that growing up, I didn't always
understand in the way that I do now.
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I think of how hard it must have been,
how profoundly unfair it must have felt
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for them to feel like they had
to strip away parts of my childhood
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just so that I could come home at night.
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For example, I think of how one night,
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when I was around 12 years old, on an
overnight field trip to another city,
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my friends and I bought Super Soakers
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and turned the hotel parking lot
into our own water-filled battle zone.
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We hid behind cars,
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running through the darkness that
lay between the streetlights,
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boundless laughter ubiquitous
across the pavement.
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But within 10 minutes,
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my father came outside,
grabbed me by my forearm
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and led me into our room
with an unfamiliar grip.
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Before I could say anything,
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tell him how foolish he had
made me look in front of my friends,
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he derided me for being so naive.
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Looked me in the eye,
fear consuming his face,
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and said, "Son, I'm sorry,
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but you can't act the same
as your white friends.
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You can't pretend to shoot guns.
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You can't run around in the dark.
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You can't hide behind anything
other than your own teeth."
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I know now how scared he must have been,
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how easily I could have fallen
into the empty of the night,
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that some man would mistake this water
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for a good reason to wash
all of this away.
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These are the sorts of messages I've been
inundated with my entire life:
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Always keep your hands where they
can see them, don't move too quickly,
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take off your hood when the sun goes down.
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My parents raised me and my siblings
in an armor of advice,
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an ocean of alarm bells so someone
wouldn't steal the breath from our lungs,
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so that they wouldn't make
a memory of this skin.
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So that we could be kids,
not casket or concrete.
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And it's not because they thought it
would make us better than anyone else
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it's simply because they wanted
to keep us alive.
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All of my black friends were raised
with the same message,
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the talk, given to us
when we became old enough
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to be mistaken for a nail ready
to be hammered to the ground,
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when people made our melanin
synonymous with something to be feared.
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But what does it do to a child
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to grow up knowing that you
cannot simply be a child?
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That the whims of adolescence
are too dangerous for your breath,
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that you cannot simply be curious,
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that you are not afforded the luxury
of making a mistake,
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that someone's implicit bias
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might be the reason you don't
wake up in the morning.
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But this cannot be what defines us.
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Because we have parents
who raised us to understand
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that our bodies weren't meant
for the backside of a bullet,
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but for flying kites and jumping rope,
and laughing until our stomachs burst.
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We had teachers who taught us
how to raise our hands in class,
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and not just to signal surrender,
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and that the only thing we should give up
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is the idea that we
aren't worthy of this world.
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So when we say that black lives matter,
it's not because others don't,
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it's simply because we must affirm that we
are worthy of existing without fear,
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when so many things tell us we are not.
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I want to live in a world where my son
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will not be presumed guilty
the moment he is born,
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where a toy in his hand isn't mistaken
for anything other than a toy.
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And I refuse to accept that we can't
build this world into something new,
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some place where a child's name
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doesn't have to be written
on a t-shirt, or a tombstone,
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where the value of someone's life
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isn't determined by anything other
than the fact that they had lungs,
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a place where every single
one of us can breathe.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)